Search Results for: rail

BART: Give Us More $ So We Can Do Less

By | | Transportation
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Before the pandemic, the San Francisco Bay Area Rapid Transit District (BART) earned more than 70 percent of its operating costs out of fare revenues, more than any transit agency in the nation other than CalTrain. Ironically, this also made it most vulnerable to a ridership downturn, while agencies like San Jose’s Valley Transportation Authority, which covered only 9 percent of its operating costs out of fares (the fourth worst among the nation’s transit agencies), were relatively immune. Now BART is pleading for more money so it won’t have to dramatically reduce service as it exhausts federal COVID relief funds.

Click image to download a 12.6-MB PDF of this report.

As part of that plea, BART published a report on its role in the Bay Area earlier this week. The report admits that BART’s ridership has dropped — as of May, it carried less than 45 percent as many riders as before the pandemic — due to increases in remote work. “BART ridership is closely linked to office occupancy rates,” says the report, with an accompanying graphic showing that ridership has moved in almost exact parallel to San Francisco-Berkeley-Oakland office occupancies. Continue reading →

FRA Puts Price Tag on Overnight Amtrak Routes

By | | Transportation
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The Federal Railroad Administration (FRA) estimates that adding 15 new overnight routes to Amtrak’s system will cost taxpayers $46 billion to $59 billion (see pages 80 to 159 of this 18.8-MB file) plus increase Amtrak’s annual operating costs by $1.1 billion to $1.6 billion. The FRA did not estimate ridership or fare revenues, but it did estimate that adding these routes would reduce driving by 0.014 percent and the annual number of highway accidents by 0.016 percent.

Click image for a larger view.

Amtrak currently has 15 overnight train routes that carried just over 2.0 billion passenger-miles in 2023 (see page 7). These routes cost $1.3 billion to operate in that year (not counting depreciation) and earned just under $600 million in fare revenues. Amtrak admits all of them except the Virginia-Florida Auto Train lost money, and when depreciation is counted that train probably lost money as well. Continue reading →

Mid-Day Traffic Now Worse Than AM Rush Hour

By | | Transportation, Useful Data
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Morning and afternoon rush-hour traffic has returned to pre-pandemic levels in many U.S. urban areas, according to INRIX’s 2023 Global Traffic Scorecard. However, what INRIX finds most “astonishing” is that mid-day traffic has grown by an average of 23 percent and is now much greater than during the morning rush hour, and almost as great at around noon as the afternoon rush hour.

U.S. Trips by Start Hour in 2019 and 2023

This will only be astonishing to people who haven’t read the several research studies finding that people who work at home drive more miles per day than people commute who work. As the above chart indicates, morning rush-hour traffic in U.S. urban areas is down 12 percent while afternoon rush-hour traffic is down 9 percent; but total traffic is up because of the 23 percent increase in mid-day traffic. Continue reading →

He Lived Long Enough to Become the Villian

By | | News commentary
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“You either die a hero,” said a character from a Batman movie, “or you live long enough to see yourself become the villain.” Neil Goldschmidt, who died last week four days short of his 84th birthday, was once my hero but died the leading villain of Oregon politics.

The official portrait of Mayor Goldschmidt.

After working as a legal aid lawyer for several years, Goldschmidt joined his friend, homebuilder Tom Walsh, in running as reform candidates for the Portland City Council in 1970. Portland, they said, was run by a “good old boy” network that left minorities, low-income people, and many others out of the system. Goldschmidt won; Walsh lost. Continue reading →

April 2024 Transit Ridership 74.6% of 2019

By | | Transportation
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Transit systems carried less than 75 percent as many riders in April 2024 as in the same month before the pandemic, according to data released by the Federal Transit Administration last week. Transit ridership tends to be significantly greater on weekdays than weekends and holidays, but April had the same number of business days in both years. Ridership has been hovering between 73 to 76 percent for the last eight months and since March 2020 has never actually reached 76 percent of pre-pandemic levels.

Of the major modes, bus-rapid transit is doing best with 111 percent of 2019 riders, but that’s mainly because cities such as Houston, San Francisco, and Tampa opened BRT routes between 2019 and 2024. Conventional buses carried 80 percent of 2019 riders, light rail 74 percent, and heavy rail under 70 percent. Commuter trains carried 67 percent but commuter buses carried only 49 percent. Continue reading →

A Look at the Wacky Transit Industry

By | | Transportation
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Today is Earth Day, a day in which we are supposed to celebrate environmentally friendly ideas such as public transit, high-density development, and electric vehicles. My report published last week revealed that the transit lobby has hijacked affordable housing funds so that, in many cities, most of those funds are spent on expensive high-density transit-oriented developments rather than on more affordable low-rise housing.

The Federal Transit Administration has recommended that Congress fund the Inglewood Transit Connector, a $2.0 billion people mover that will be just 1.6 miles long.

Last month, the Federal Transit Administration released its 2025 funding recommendations for transit capital improvements. This allows us to see some of the wacky ideas that the transit industry has come up with in recent years. Continue reading →

February Driving Up 2.3 Percent from 2019

By | | Transportation, Useful Data
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After accounting for Leap Day, Americans drove almost 2.3 percent more miles per day in February 2024 than in the same month of 2019, according to data released by the Federal Highway Administration on Friday. Rural driving was 9.7 percent more than before the pandemic while urban driving was 0.8 percent less. At least some of these differences are due to people moving from urban to rural areas.

The February 2024 line for driving is obscured by the line for Amtrak, but both are approximately 102 percent.

While Amtrak, air travel, and driving have all fully recovered from the pandemic, transit has not. When I posted February 2024 transit data last week, someone commented that “Some areas have nearly recovered” while “areas like the Bay Area drag the data down.” It’s true that a handful of areas have recovered, in many cases because they are giving away transit rides for free. But most have not, unless you define 80 percent as “nearly recovered.” As of last week’s February data, out of the nation’s 50 largest urban areas, only 2 have fully recovered and only three more saw 90 percent of pre-pandemic ridership. Continue reading →

Is It Safe to Ride Transit?

By | | Transportation, Useful Data
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Less than half of New York City residents feel safe riding the subway today, down from 82 percent before the pandemic. Subway crime is so bad that New York’s governor called out the national guard to patrol subway stations. Crime is up on San Francisco BART trains despite the agency putting more police on trains. A few days ago, a mentally ill person stabbed someone to death on a Portland light-rail train.

Will putting more police in subway stations solve the crime problem? Probably not if BART’s experience is any guide. Photo by Elvert Barnes.

Some people say transit crime is dropping so it’s safe to ride transit. Others say it is getting worse. Who’s right? We can get some answers from the Federal Transit Administration’s Major Safety Events Database, which was recently updated with data through the end of 2023. Continue reading →

Cordelia Is Running Ramsey County

By | | Transportation
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“When I go shopping,” said Cordelia Chase, the vapid “mean girl” in Buffy the Vampire Slayer, “I have to have the most expensive thing, not because it’s expensive, but because it costs more.” That seems to be the rule guiding Ramsey County, home of St. Paul, Minnesota.

A streetcar in Kansas City heroically manages to block five lanes of traffic all at once. Photo by Jason Doss.

The county is considering two major alternatives for a transit line from St. Paul Union Depot (SPUD) to the Mall of America (MOA) via Minneapolis-St. Paul Airport (MSP): a modern streetcar, which can move less than 3,000 people per hour at about 16 miles per hour and would cost $2.1 billion; and a bus-rapid transit line that could move 10,000 to 20,000 people per hour supposedly at 18 miles per hour (but I bet it could run much faster) and is estimated to cost $121 million to build and half as much to operate as the streetcar line. Continue reading →

Europe More “Auto-Dependent” Than U.S.

By | | Transportation, Useful Data
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Before the pandemic, Europeans relied on automobiles for 70 percent of their travel, compared with 77 percent for U.S. residents. But after the pandemic, in 2021, the European share of passenger travel that used automobiles climbed to 80 percent, while the U.S. share increased only to 78 percent (and dropped to 74 percent in 2022), according to a recently released report from the European Union. That means that Europe is more auto-dependent than the U.S.

Click image to download a 12.4-MB PDF of this report.

Although the report is labeled “2023,” it actually was released in late January 2024 and includes data through 2021. The title of the report is “key figures,” which is literally true: it consists almost solely of figures as in charts, with little or no actual data. However, the charts are clear and can be read to the nearest percent or so. Meanwhile, National Transportation Statistics table 1-40 shows the share of passenger travel in the United States that relies on autos, airplanes, rail, and other modes. Continue reading →